Inge-Marie Eigsti

Professor

Psychological Sciences

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Education

Ph.D., 2001, University of Rochester

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Research Interests

Dr. Eigsti’s research addresses a fundamental challenge of autism: how complex behavioral constructs, such as social communication abilities, are linked to mechanistic neurocognitive processes. Much of her work examines low-level (often, non-social) cognitive processes, such as working memory and auditory processing, that can be linked to genetic, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical domains, and that impact socio-communicative development. The aim is to better understand language acquisition and language processing in autism by connecting research at the neurofunctional level (brain imaging) and behavioral (symptomatology) levels. Current projects examine: 

• Psycholinguistics in autism
• Long-term outcomes in autistic adults
• Special skills in autism (including hyperlexia and unexpected bilingualism)
• Conversational gestures
• Speech and voice in autistic people who speak
• Statistical bases of language acquisition

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Teaching

Undergraduate 

• Abnormal Psychology (2300)
• Autism and Developmental Disorders (3202)

Graduate 

• Cognitive Assessment (5301)
• Language Acquisition and Cognitive Development in Language Pathologies (5470)

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Publications

Recent

Eigsti, I. M., Larson, C., & Naigles, L. R. (2025). Associations between pragmatic language and theory of mind in individuals with a history of autism and those who have lost the autism diagnosis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 380(1932), 20230504.

Canale, R. R., Larson, C., Thomas, R. P., Barton, M., Fein, D., & Eigsti, I. M. (2024). Investigating frank autism: clinician initial impressions and autism characteristics. Molecular Autism, 15(1), 48. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-024-00627-z

Dumont, C., Belenger, M., Eigsti, I. M., & Kissine, M. (2024). Enhanced pitch discrimination in autistic children with unexpected bilingualism. Autism Res, 17(9), 1844-1852. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3221

Eigsti, I. M. (2024). The autism constellation and neurodiversity: Long-term and adult outcomes in autism spectrum disorder. Pediatric Clinics of North America, 71(2), 327-341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcl.2024.01.003

Representative

Eigsti, I. M., Bennetto, L., & Dadlani, M. B. (2007). Beyond pragmatics: Morphosyntactic development in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(6), 1007-1023. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0239-2

Eigsti, I. M., & Fein, D. A. (2013). More is less: pitch discrimination and language delays in children with optimal outcomes from autism. Autism Research, 6(6), 605-613. doi: 610.1002/aur.1324.

Eigsti, I. M., Stevens, M., Schultz, R., Barton, M., Kelley, E., Naigles, L. R., . . . Fein, D. A. (2016). Language comprehension and brain function in individuals with optimal outcomes from autism. NeuroImage: Clinical, 10, 182-91. doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2015.11.014

Naples, A., Tenenbaum, E. J., Jones, R. N., Righi, G., Sheinkopf, S. J., & Eigsti, I. M. (2023). Exploring communicative competence in autistic children who are minimally verbal: The Low Verbal Investigatory Survey for Autism (LVIS). Autism, 27(3), 1391–1406. doi:10.1177/13623613221136657

Schuh, J. M., Eigsti, I. M., & Mirman, D. (2016). Discourse comprehension in autism spectrum disorder: Effects of working memory load and common ground. Autism Research, 9(12), 1340-1352. doi: 1310.1002/aur.1632.